Fault-tolerant Active Matrix Liquid Crystal Displays (AMLCDs) are useful for flight-critical, primary aircraft cockpit displays where safety and high reliability are of the utmost importance. Such can be the case for both military and commercial aircraft platforms. However, the desired fault tolerance presents significant challenges. Generally speaking, fault tolerance in this context typically refers to the ability of the system to function despite a failure such that a single point of failure doesn't render the system inoperative. As the lives of flight crews can depend on the display, it is important that the system be reliable.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,295,179 and 7,728,788 both present possible approaches to fault tolerance through simple redundancy. U.S. Pat. No. 7,295,179 describes a liquid crystal display with two identical but totally electrically isolated left and right side displays residing on one single glass substrate. Under this arrangement, if a fault occurs in one side of the composite display (in one of the displays), the other side will still be operational. Thus, in this arrangement, the two displays can be driven to appear as one display and if one of the displays fails, the failing display is simply turned off and the other display continues (but with now only half of the total display area of the two displays working together). So in essence, a fault in the left or right (or top or bottom) portion of the composite display can be isolated to the left or the right (or top or bottom) portion and does not render the entire display unusable.
The approach put forward in U.S. Pat. No. 7,728,788 partitions the liquid crystal display into multiple sections which are driven by independent sources. Fault tolerance is achieved somewhat in that if one section fails, the remaining section(s) can remain operational.
The approach put forward in Republic of Korea patent 10-1999-0052420 adds data lines for the purpose of improving manufacturing yield and allows dual gate drive which helps overcome internal propagation delay times in the long axis of the display.
Unfortunately, if a fault occurs in the above solutions, typically there is some amount of the original (display) information lost, but the display system might yet still display enough information for the flight crew to return home safely. Accordingly, it can be seen that a need yet remains for a robust fault-tolerant display system. It is to the provision of such that the present invention is primarily directed.